The series of protests that political parties and public servants have threatened over the coming days, weeks and months has the potential of making Sri Lanka into a virtually ungoverned nation into an ungovernable country. In turn, this can have consequences for the much-needed economic recovery, which hinges on the triple factors of initial IMF-led credit, foreign investments and of course the fast-tracked revival of the tourism sector.
All along, successive governments and their leaderships have been ruling the nation, not governed it. The two JVP insurgencies, the long drawn-out ethnic protests, war and violence, and last year’s Aragalaya protests were all the products of such non-governance and were also exhibits of the same. However, there was/is a difference. Like the early moderate, Gandhian Tamil protests, the Aragalaya too was a peaceful one, with no identifiable leader but only an all-identifiable cause.
It was very clear from the beginning that some political parties were working behind it all for the Aragalaya and its success, but kept themselves at a distance, for obvious reasons. Historians and sociologists would ponder over reams of material to see if there were any visible links between the Aragalaya and such other anti-Establishment, people-centric movements like the ‘Arab Spring’, the ‘Orange Revolution, and even the ‘Jallikattu protests’ across the Palk Strait, in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu – or, it only drew inspiration from them all.
Thereby hangs a tale, as it could hold the key to the murmurs that claimed ‘foreign hands’ entire scene a different script, which should be unacceptable. For, if it can target one set of rulers today, it can happen to another set or other sets in their time.
Convenient scapegoat
President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s recent pledge to prioritise the nation’s economic recovery and at the same time establish a functioning democratic society before year-end has to be viewed in this context. In doing so, he has also given equal priority to law and order to prevent anarchy. It is only a reiteration of his pledge soon after taking over, where there were signs and fears of the Aragalaya protests, if allowed to continue unchecked, could have led to anarchy, if not an ‘urban guerrilla’ attack of which the nation still has not had adequate exposure, despite the JVP-LTTE kind of experiences.
Hence, Wickremesinghe also seems personally unwilling to face the nation-wide local government elections (LGE) and has found a convenient scapegoat in the government’s Rajapaksa-led SLPP under-writer. The former does not want LGE, the latter is said to be afraid of losing the LGE, badly. Independent of the outcomes, there is going to be some kind of political instability that needs avoiding – so, seems to be the illogical logic, which no one wants to spell out in clear terms.
Should the SLPP-UNP combine lose the LGE badly, then there would be howls of protests and rallies. for the President dissolving Parliament and ordering general elections, way ahead of schedule. There will of course be relatively feeble demands for the resignation of the President and fresh presidential polls, too. But because everyone by now know the constitutional possibilities, they also know the imponderables – the kind of which that made Ranil, Prime Minister first, and President later, all within weeks. All of it means political instability.
Imagine what looks like an impossible situation. That the ruling combine wins, if not sweeps the LGE, going by the number of local government bodies that the SLPP in particular retains. Then, there would be efforts to engineer defection of more MPs from the SJP-led Opposition combine. Rumours would start floating that the government would have Parliament extend the latter’s term by a year or two, to help face off the economic crisis. No one can complain, not the Sajith Premadasa-led SJB, as the senior, Ranasinghe Premadasa was a part of the JRJ team that had similarly extended Parliament’s term by a year when there was no real crisis of the present kind. Again, there will be political instability.
Political instability is not good for economic recovery, after all. Unlike in the past, post-Easter blasts, post-dollar crisis, individual foreign tourist would be reading up on Sri Lanka, to decide if it would be his destination for a quiet family holiday. If the political situation is not seen as being stable, the intended visitor would attribute economic instability too to the evolving situation as never before. Definitely under such circumstances, the dollar would become shaky all over again. Out go, your tourists. The investor is even more sensitive, and even more informed.
Candle-light dinners
Whether these are justifications for the government wanting to put off the LGE – and the matter is coming up before the Supreme Court on 23 February, if not earlier – there is no justification for the government to keep hiking up the power-tariff, as it is the panacea for all the nation’s economic ills. After hiking power-tariff by a high 60 per cent last year, the government had no business to do it again within months (not even a full year has passed since the last one).
Together with the reported 66-per cent increase in power-tariff this time, the Government has taken electricity away from the common man. No one should wonder, or shocked if his neighbour’s house doing a candle-light dinner (not that candles and kerosene lamps come cheap, any more) and attribute it to anything other than a conscious decision to cut down on power consumption. That is where the authorities had not disconnected power supply for non-payment of the levied charges. In such a scenario, leave aside candle-light dinners, the neighbour may not have had dinner, too, in the first place. There are going to be more such neighbours and neighbourhoods, in the months to come, where they are already not there.
Yet, for all the protests that public sector employees are making, starting with higher income-tax rates imposed in the face of the economic crisis, not one of them is ready to say that as a segment they are willing to make the ‘sacrifice’ for the nation’s good. Maybe, if it were a new leadership – both of the government and of the unions – they would have said so. The situation is such that all trade unions and professional associations, like those of lawyers, doctors and engineers, keep complaining about the continuance of the same old leaders in the same old roles despite the Aragalaya. But they refuse to even recognise that they themselves have entrenched leaderships, for years now – and make any great difference or contribution to the existing situation as they otherwise claim to desire.
It is thus old wine in older bottle, all-round. Even in politics, where the likes of JVP and FSP, otherwise crying for change, do not offer to change their own leaderships. It is more so in the case of the JVP, where the ADK leadership of Anura Kumara Dissanayake too has stayed on, far too long. If anything, pollsters and analysts are only discussing the possibility of AKD being elected the next President/Prime Minister, not really the JVP coming to power as a party – even though that is the reality in such a situation.
https://colombogazette.com/2023/02/20/ungoverned-ungovernable/
(The writer is a policy analyst & political commentator, based in Chennai, India. Email: sathiyiam54@nsatthiyamoorthy.com)
